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Connection

A red kite traces a lazy spiral

Across a honeycomb of houses

Rows and rows of chipped and fading brickwork

Gathered in the shadow of her wing.

 

Bleary-eyed I leave the computer

And listen to a congregation of starlings

Beat each other up over dinner

And come clattering onto the drainpipe.

 

Arid days and lonely mid-mornings

Waiting for your jack-o’-lantern image

To flicker brightly like blue candlelight

Across the pixels of my desktop

 

Battling through bad connection

Over hundreds of miles

You are never really further

Than the mug beside my lamp

Or the book at my bedside.

 

Peter Thorn is a teacher of English living on a blasted heath somewhere in South Surrey. In his spare time, he goes bird-watching, blunders through Italian lessons and secretly thinks Coldplay are OK up to the fourth album. His writing, at times serious, tends to revolve around his own sad, horrible sense of humour, in the hope that anyone similarly disaffected will at last be able to have a reassuring chuckle. Goes well with brie.

Read more of his work at aloka here: https://aloka-magazine.com/2020/04/19/pigeon-england-the-importance-of-meaning-and-unspecific-empathy-in-a-world-in-chaos/ and here: https://aloka-magazine.com/2020/05/10/the-roman-peter-thorn-fiction/